This disclosure relates to the field of mounts for optical structures, including but not limited to, reflective panels and hollow retroreflectors.
Optical structures such as, but not limited to, reflective panels (mirror panels) and hollow retroreflectors are old in the art. Hollow retroreflectors are made of three mirror panels joined together, each preferably having an optically flat reflective surface disposed at a right angle to the reflective surface of each of the other two panels. Where all three panels meet can be described as a common inside corner of an imaginary cube, or apex. Hollow retroreflectors have the property of causing incident and reflected light rays to travel along substantially parallel paths.
When hollow retroreflectors are assembled for high accuracy and precision it is important to maintain the mutual perpendicularity of the reflective surfaces and sometimes essential to ensure that the retroreflector as a whole does not move. The perpendicularity of the reflective surfaces is affected by external stresses. With regard to high accuracy and precise reflective panels, such as mirror panels to be used for high accuracy purposes, it is also important to try and maintain as optically flat as possible the reflective surfaces of the panels. Accordingly, external stresses cause distortion to the optical flatness of the reflective surfaces of the reflective panels of a hollow retroreflector and these distortions will then cause distortion to the exiting wavefront of the exiting light ray. Such distortion of the exiting light ray increases beam deviation, thereby causing the exiting light ray to no longer be parallel to the entering (incident) light ray.